Lawrence Block - Step by Step

Pushing through those 2.4 miles, stopping periodically to lie down and each time making myself get up and go on, I wondered what was such a big deal about walking a distance in miles corresponding to my age in years. It’s significant when an aging golfer is able to shoot his age, and it’s a goal that, but for the ravages of time, grows more attainable with every passing year — impossible under sixty, less so after seventy, and, if you can still swing a club, rather more likely in one’s eighties.

For a walker or runner, it was quite the opposite. Time kept raising the bar, even as age made it harder to get over it. Walking one’s age — no challenge at twenty, not much of one at forty — grew ever more difficult.

In another year, I told myself, I’d be one more year older, and have one more mile to cover. So I might as well do it now.

It was somewhere around four in the morning when I finished Lap Twenty-eight. Those last three laps had taken a long time, because I was incapable of moving at a decent pace. I’d now reached the goal one more lap would have given me in the heat of Wakefield, I’d walked my age, but one more lap now would put me over seventy miles, and I sat in the walkers’ tent and told Bruce how much I wanted that number.

He pointed out that I was a lot less than a full lap away from it. I had covered 69.46 miles, I was just over half a mile short of 70, and if I couldn’t manage another lap just now, well, I didn’t have to, not with almost four hours left in the race. I could go lie down somewhere and return to the course in a couple of hours. Ollie had gone off for a nap a while ago, and Dave was lying down, too. I could do that, and maybe my back would be better for it, but even if it wasn’t, a couple of hours rest might make it easier for me to push through one final lap.

“And if you wait until seven o’clock,” he added, “you won’t have to do a full lap, because that’s when they start doing minilaps, an eighth of a mile each, and you could just walk back and forth until you get up to seventy.”

It sounded like a good idea. I didn’t bother hobbling over to the building where they had the cots; it seemed like too challenging a walk just to get there. Besides, I was afraid if I let myself actually lie down in a real bed, I’d never make it back to the track in time. Instead I went to my car and sat behind the wheel. That doesn’t sound terribly comfortable, but I found a position in which my back didn’t hurt, and right then that was all the comfort I needed.

I slept until a little after six. At some point the rain resumed, but by the time I was up it had tapered off to a misty drizzle. I headed for Bruce’s tent, and within ten steps I could tell there’d been no miraculous sleep cure. My back wasn’t any better, and walking was no pleasure.

I got a cup of coffee and something to eat and sat down while Bruce brought me up to date. Dave Daubert and Ollie Nanyes were both back on the course after their naps, a fairly brief lie-down for Dave, a longer break for Ollie. Three local walkers, a man and two women, had dropped out earlier, with totals ranging from twenty-five to fifty-six miles. Marshall, who’d left the course after twenty-nine laps, had not returned.

Barb Curnow, a local walker a year or so younger than I, was still out there. She walked FANS every year, and she never showed much in the way of speed, but the woman never stopped. I’d passed her a couple of times over the hours, but there she was, as indefatigable as the Energizer Bunny, still going and going and going while all I could do was sit there.

At seven I walked over to the start/finish line. Most people who tacked on minilaps did so at the end of a full lap; a runner would complete a circuit of the course at, say, 7:40, decide the twenty remaining minutes wouldn’t be enough time for him to get around again, and switch to minilaps until time ran out. There were just a couple of us who began the final hour with minilaps, and our ranks swelled over time as others joined in.

The course for these short laps extended from the start/finish line for an eighth of a mile, at which point you turned around and headed back again. If I could run this particular fool’s errand three times, I’d add three-quarters of a mile to my tally, and that would get me over seventy miles.

It was surprisingly difficult. I walked as rapidly as I could, not because my pace mattered at this point but in an effort to be done with it as soon as possible. The pain was considerable. Here’s how unpleasant the whole business was: afterward, when I learned they were counting every eighth of a mile, I realized I could have quit half a lap earlier than I did, could have gone out and back and out and back and out, and left it at that. I’d have wound up with 70.09 miles, and I’d have saved 210 agonizing yards.

At the same time, it was hard to sit on the sidelines while the rest of the final hour played itself out. I don’t know when I finished my third and final minilap, but there’s no way three-quarters of a mile could have taken me more than twenty minutes at the outside. That left me with forty minutes to watch other entrants fitting in every bit of distance they could before the last minutes ticked away.

I was especially aware of Ollie, so invigorated by his couple of hours of downtime that he kept at it right up to the whistle. It was frustrating to watch him, not because he might overtake me — he’d finish with 66.11 miles — but because I felt I ought to be doing the same, pushing myself clear to the end. I was in no danger of doing so, I was able to recognize that my race was over, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.

At the awards presentation, Dave Daubert took first place in the walking division, finishing with 80.76 miles. (That’s just slightly more than ten miles per pair of shoes.) Barb Curnow was second with 75.42, and Marshall’s twenty-nine laps put him third. I was fourth, Ollie fifth, and three others finished out the field.

Five of us had earned Ulli Kamm awards, and Bruce promised he’d ship them to us. And every entrant had received a finisher’s award at registration, a small wooden plaque with a bronze medallion inset; a metal tag inscribed with name and mileage would be mailed to us in due course.

Yeah, right, I thought. That’s what they’d told us a year and a half ago in Houston, and wasn’t I still waiting for the nameplate for that Ulli Kamm award?

I walked to my car, drove to my hotel, had a shower, and took to my bed. My back didn’t bother me, not now, not while I was lying down, and all in all I felt wonderful. I’d broken my record by almost four miles, I’d walked in miles an age I wouldn’t attain until a couple of weeks after next year’s FANS race, and I’d achieved almost all of my goals.

I hadn’t reached seventy-five miles, let alone the triple marathon or the eighty-mile mark. But I would have managed all of that if something hadn’t stabbed me in the back. As for my goal of staying out there for the full twenty-four hours, I’d fallen short by a few hours — but this time I hadn’t been driven off the course by fatigue or a failure of will. As far as my mind was concerned, I’d been ready and willing to keep on walking from the first minute to the last. It was my body that had given out, specifically my back, and I could no more castigate myself for that than Oz Pearlman could beat himself up for his injured knee.

Aside from my back, the rest of me seemed to be in pretty good shape. The first aid I’d received had helped my blisters, and one of them seemed in the process of reabsorbing the liquid and mending itself. I opened the other and expressed the fluid, and it looked all right to me. My feet weren’t 100 percent, but they weren’t all that bad for having gone that far, and I figured they’d be in good enough condition in three weeks’ time for the marathon in Anchorage.